Tag: donald trump jr.
How Trump Team Staged Junior's Publicity Trip To Greenland

How Trump Team Staged Junior's Publicity Trip To Greenland

President-elect Donald Trump's eldest son, Donald Jr., visited Greenland earlier this week as his father continues to push for the island to become a U.S. territory. But locals were considerably chillier to Donald Jr.'s visit than depicted, according to one official.

In an interview with Politico, Greenland parliament member Pipaluk Lynge pushed back on the president-elect's assertion that his son's delegation was received with open arms. While Trump insisted on Truth Social that "the reception has been great," Lynge said the visit was artificial and structured to insulate Donald Jr. from any negative imagery.

"No journalists were allowed to interview him," Lynge told the outlet. "It was all staged to make it seem like we — the Greenlandic people — were MAGA and love to be a part of the USA."

"People were curious, but some took pictures giving him [the] finger at the airport … Some wrote on Facebook: yankee go home," she added.

Donald Trump Jr. told Politico that any suggestion his visit wasn't received well was "ridiculous," and denied that the Greenland trip was staged. But Lynge countered that her country was well-aware of the United States' history of disrespect toward Indigenous communities and that the island prefers independence from both the U.S. and from Denmark, which currently claims control of Greenland.

“We know how they treat the Inuit in Alaska,” Lynge said. “Make that great before trying to invade us.”

Earlier this week, the Guardian reported that King Frederik II of Denmark changed the country's coat of arms for the first time in 50 years to emphasize Greenland, which is represented on the royal crest by a polar bear. Denmark, which is a key NATO ally, has already indicated that the island is not for sale and would reject any effort by the president-elect to purchase the territory.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Snark Won't Save Us From Trump And His Grifting Henchmen

Snark Won't Save Us From Trump And His Grifting Henchmen

Put on your slicker and turn up your hood, because I’m about to rain on the commentariat parade that has spent the day stomping on Kimberly Guilfoyle, she of the recent break-up with Donald Trump Jr. and subsequent appointment to be our ambassador to the birthplace of Democracy, the country of Greece. Substack columns and Democratic-leaning blogs have had what we used to call a field day making fun of Guilfoyle herself and the supposition that Don Jr. went to his father and asked him to give her something to do that would take her as far away as possible from Palm Beach and Washington D.C.

“Greece begs Guilfoyle to stay in U.S. We can hear her from here,” Andy Borowitz said on Substack, where he now publishes. “So he breaks up with her and ships her off to Greece? I smell a Hallmark Movie” read one post on X.

It’s hard to resist being snarky about Guilfoyle when Trump’s announcement of her appointment includes absurd praise of her “extensive experience and leadership in law, media, and politics along with her sharp intellect,” when the sum total of her actual experience is having been the host of a Fox News talk show. Guilfoyle expressed her thanks on Instagram say, “As ambassador, I look forward to delivering on the Trump agenda, supporting our Greek allies, and ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity.”

Evan Hurst writing on Wonkette, in a withering take-down of Guilfoyle’s appointment, wrote, “Thank God, our long-running war against Greece is coming to an end!”

I confess that my own tastes in commentary often run to snark and ridicule of political figures with whom I disagree and of whom I am contemptuous. Kimberly Guilfoyle is one such figure. Others have recently included Kash Patel, Matt Gaetz, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and many, many more. Each are laughable in their own unique ways, and I have launched snarky arrows at each of them repeatedly.

An absurd character such as Guilfoyle is far too easy of a target, but she and others like her are what Donald Trump is giving us.

In the election of Donald Trump to a second term in the White House, we have reached a point where snark and ridicule, while fun, are reaching their limits. Some of Trump’s appointments have indeed been laughable. Others, however, are sinister and represent threats to the way that this country has traditionally been governed: with a seriousness of purpose that measures up to the task at hand, no matter the department of government or the issues faced here and abroad.

Donald Trump was not that kind of president in his first term, and he shows every sign of going even more outside the norms of American governance this time around. In fact, with his appointments of right-wing bomb throwers and business cronies, Trump appears to be systematically forming a government that he will systematically loot for his own monetary advantage. He has appointed billionaires to oversee and regulate industries and sectors of the economy in which they hold major investments. Trump and his sons recently established their own crypto trading firm, World Liberty Financial, in which a Chinese crypto entrepreneur has invested $30 million, of which $20 million is estimated will accrue to Donald Trump personally, given the structure of his ownership in the business. Trump’s other son, Eric, has made no secret of his father’s interest in allowing crypto to be traded virtually without regulation, and plans have even been announced to have the U.S. Treasury create a so-called “strategic reserve” of crypto currencies in the amount of $100 billion or more. Investment by the U.S. government in anything is sure to send its value up, this increasing the value of whatever Trump’s crypto holdings are.

The chances for insider trading are off the charts with Trump’s appointment of Paul Atkins as Securities and Exchange Commissioner. Atkins is the CEO of a consulting business that has large crypto clients and is known to be an advocate for what Trump, in his appointment message, called “digital assets.”

“Digital assets,” for those keeping score, are what you get when you take real dollars that you can deposit in banks and use to buy things like food and cars and houses, and instead you buy a so-called “wallet” which contains nothing more than bits of code that is secret, the access to which is secret, the value of which is secret, and which is valued by a market with few boundaries or rules that protect investors against fraud and abuses like ponzi schemes. This description of what crypto amounts to is snarky, but the potential damage to what crypto can do to our economy and to the people who buy its bits and “wallets” is real.

Let us sum up our situation this way: the political and economic and humanitarian life of this nation is already in deep peril, and Donald Trump has not even been inaugurated yet. Snark can help us deal with what we face, but it isn’t going to save us from a man with no morals and criminally defective judgement who will soon have our nuclear codes in the room with him at all times. We can make fun of his hair and makeup, we can speak of the absurdity of his lies, we can point to his conflicts of interest and his obvious greed, we can make a list of the crimes he has already committed and been indicted for and been convicted of, but we must take seriously this man and his array of compatriots and fellow travelers and co-conspirators in the schemes we know he has in mind to carry out over the four years of his presidency. And I will never be able to resist the snark that will flow like the current of the Delaware River every time I consider the fools and knaves who have been thrust upon us.

We will soon live in a time when Donald Trump and his MAGA followers have their hands on the levers of power. We can deploy snark and ridicule to help us untangle ourselves from the dilemma Democracy has given us, but just making ourselves feel good is not enough. Facts leave bite marks. Reason deployed in the service of good has moral and practical power. This is not the end of history. It is the beginning of a profound struggle to ensure that the ideals upon which this country was founded, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, will not perish from this earth.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


Danziger Draws

Danziger Draws

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.

Felon: Will Trump's Conviction Break The Authoritarian Spell?

Felon: Will Trump's Conviction Break The Authoritarian Spell?

It only took a jury a day and a half to decide that Donald Trump, former President of the United States, was guilty on all counts. He will wear the convicted felon label on his back forever, no matter what happens in November. A jury of seven men and five women voted guilty on all 34 counts against him. He will be sentenced July 11. The penalty includes prison time. He likely won’t go, and in the unlikely event that he does, Never Trump conservative lawyer George Conway told me the Constitution would likely be read to require that any state holding him open the cell door if he is elected in November.

But the verdict is another historic landmark in the long list of awful firsts that the MAGA cult leader has inflicted on our country since he rode down the golden elevator in the summer of 2015, enthralling first the media and then a swath of America.

The first of those horrors is the separation of millions of Americans from faith in the law and process of democracy. In the hour after the verdict, on Xitter, on Fox, on rightwing platforms and channels, MAGAs were blind with rage, spitting accusations. It’s a measure of the success of this one man’s assault on American institutions - “fake news"!” “Deep State!” “Rigged against me!” - that untold millions will refuse to accept the fairness of the trial. His people are so unplugged from our commonweal that they are willing to believe the Manhattan DA works for a Hungarian billionaire whose name the rabid right made synonymous with their own invisible donor-monster the Koch family. They are willing to believe that a sitting judge who spends his days in a cold, smelly courtroom at 100 Centre Street, and the men and women of the jury who did their civic duty in the same room and listened to all the evidence, were just pawns of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Utter lunacy. Sadly, we’re used to it.

One of the rabble outside the courtroom was caught on camera threatening to go inside the courtroom and trash the place. AR 15 memes flooded the platforms. The sophisticates on social media flung profanity, the Overton window of civil political discourse long ago smashed by their Dear Leader.

“Bullshit!” Donny Jr. tweeted. “This Trump show trial is Bullsh!t,” wrote the soigné former Nixon aide, Monica Crowley.

Brother Eric, who squirmed in the courtroom through Stormy Daniels’ description of his father’s seduction technique, fumed at the outrage that a man could become a felon for just “a 130k NDA”!

Trained lawyer and TV personality Megyn Kelly, personally and obscenely trashed by Trump for asking him hard questions during a 2016 debate "(“she’s got blood coming out of her wherever!”) whined to her three million followers that “The country is disgraced” (yes, the rest of us noticed that, but back in November 2016).

Like so many Trumpers, Kelly also issued an implied warning, “They will rue the day they unleashed this lawfare to corrupt a presidential election.”

Rue the day. We’ll get you back. You’ll regret it. Threats, promises of violence, pictures of automatic weapons, bloodlust vengeance. All of it projected from their own Dear Leader and back out onto regular Americans just trying to make sense of it all.

Many MAGAs are now using the banana word. David Sacks, a grotesquely pro-Trump Silicon Valley billionaire, wrote, “There is now only one issue in this election: whether the American people will stand for the USA becoming a banana republic.”

The charitable view here is that Sacks is mainlining K with Elon and failed to notice that America went full banana republic on a summer night in 2016 when Gen. Michael Flynn led thousands of Republican delegates at the nominating convention in Cleveland in a chant of “Lock Her Up.” That Gen. Flynn ultimately got convicted himself (alas, not locked up) only proves the point, especially as he roams free today, another Trump pardonee like Steve Bannon, despoiling the political landscape and spewing conspiracy theories to low-information Q-Anon zombies.

Flynn’s rant and the crowd’s chant were unprecedented in American politics back then. It was shocking to witness the beginning of the idea of using the law for vengeance against one’s political opponents. In office, Trump tried to get his DOJ to manifest the authoritarian dream. But the “adults in the room” still clung to the mores of another era, and resisted, or quit.

The next administration will be vetted for people who won’t have those reservations. There may be none of them left.

Let’s be clear: the 91 criminal indictments against Trump are not “politically motivated.” Dozens of his minions in Arizona, Michigan and Georgia in the fake elector and January 6 conspiracy schemes have been turning like pancakes, or going bankrupt fighting a losing fight. He is recorded bragging about purloined classified national secrets.

Trump only still skates, he only still walks free right now because, contrary to the persecuted image he wants to project of “fighting The Man,” like the angry little guys who think he speaks for them, he is, in fact, The Man.

The New York judge and prosecutors bent over backwards allowing Defendant Trump to behave in ways that would have had any other accused individual locked up pre trial. Trump walks free with money in the bank even though he has already been convicted in a massive civil fraud trial, and of sexual abuse and forcible touching and then lying about it, in another civil case. Prosecutors have reams of evidence against him in the three criminal cases in two other states, cases that only thanks to the delay machinations of his lawyers and the horrifying ineptitude and bias of one of the judges, will not be decided before November 5.

Judging from the outpouring of anger at the conviction, his felonious status will not move his true fans. As historian Ruth Ben Ghiat wrote in her excellent book about modern dictators, from Putin to Xi, to Orban and Trump today and Mussolini and Hitler before them, the criminality of an authoritarian leader can be an essential element in his (always his, by the way, women need not apply) appeal.

“The strongman’s rogue nature also draws people to him. He proclaims law and order rule, yet enables lawlessness. This paradox becomes official policy, as government evolves into a criminal enterprise, Hitler’s Germany being one example and Putin’s Russia another. Millions around the world have found it intoxicating to be able to commit criminal acts with impunity… the thrill of transgression mixed with the comfort of submitting to his power turns the everyday into the exceptional, endowing life with energy, purpose, and drama.”

Trump was right about one thing in his surly first words to the public as a convicted felon, outside the courtroom, with his chagrined loser lawyer standing by (surely Todd Blanche was expecting to hear the L word from his belligerent client in the black SUV in short order).

The real verdict, the convicted defendant said, will be rendered on November 5. Right.

Will a majority of voters cling to the felonious leader’s fantasy that every institution and civil servant in America is utterly corrupted by “the left” and “Soros” and out to get him? Will they show up to vote having lost every iota of faith they ever had in the commonweal, in the possibility that their fellow Americans do the right thing in courtrooms and on juries and in the news media, believing that every non MAGA election worker, Capitol police officer, prosecutor, or New York state judge is engaged in a systematic conspiracy against Donald Trump?

The great question after today is whether the red F now stamped on Trump’s back, not unlike the Nixon tattoo on his fellow convicted felon Roger Stone’s back, will dampen the enthusiasm of any on-the-fence, decent, right-leaning voters still cued in to the possibility of the decency of our institutions after eight years of being persistently propagandized to abandon that faith.

Are there any left? Helloooo! Are you out there? Paying attention?

If so, you don’t have to vote for Biden. We will forgive you if you just stay home on Election Day and leave the man to his ignominious fate.

Reprinted with permission from American Political Freakshow

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, and documentary producer. She is the author of seven books including most recently Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America's Response to the Pandemic and an adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World